Both of them giggled and Peter added victoriously, ‘And Jane. Uncle Frazer was really angry when we told him Jane wanted to marry him, wasn’t he?’
‘Furious,’ Helen agreed with obvious enjoyment.
With every word she overheard, Rebecca’s heart sank further. What on earth was she letting herself in for, and why?
‘Norty says Cousin Becky will soon teach us to mind our manners,’ Peter reminded his sister.
Helen said witheringly, ‘Cousin Becky! We’ve never even met her, have we, apart from that once at the wedding, and I bet she isn’t coming here because of us at all. I bet it’s because of Frazer. Norty says he’s the best catch in the area and it’s high time he settled down and had some children of his own.’
Furious, exasperated and conscious of a growing numbness in her cramped limbs, Rebecca stayed where she was.
Norty—Mrs Norton—was Frazer’s housekeeper. She had been with the family during Frazer and Rory’s parents’ lifetime, and Rebecca remembered her with particular fondness. She hoped it wasn’t from the housekeeper that the twins had got the idea that she had come up here solely on account of Frazer, and as for that idea—well, she decided grimly, she would very quickly disabuse them of it!
She wasn’t a shy eighteen-year-old any more. What she had once felt for Frazer had long ago died—perhaps a little more violently and cruelly than it would have done in the normal course of events, but its death had been a necessary one. Most girls went through a period of intense emotional adulation for some older man. Most of them, though, were far too sensible to fix that adulation on a member of their own family.
She had thought of Frazer as some kind of Olympian being, all-knowing, all-wise, allseeing. No virtue had been too high for him to reach. What a fool she had been when, desperate and trapped, Rory had begged her to help him, she had done so willingly, delighting in the opportunity to sacrifice herself for the greater good. Frazer’s greater good.
If she had expected that somehow or other he would divine the truth, she had been bitterly disappointed. If she had expected that he would not only divine the truth, but lavish praise and gratitude on her for that sacrifice, she had been doubly disappointed. What he had in actual fact done was to read her such a savage and bitter lecture that it had been months if not years before she had ever been able to hold up her head again.
At first shock had numbed the worst of her feelings of degradation and humiliation, but then, as the shock wore off, reality had begun to take its place; the reality of realising that Frazer condemned her for what he had termed as her criminal and idiotic folly in becoming involved in an affair with his brother.
If once she had hoped he would come to see the truth, now she no longer did. Now she doubted that it would make any difference even if he did know the truth. Frazer had never liked being wrong about anything, she remembered bitterly.
The children were walking past her now, and just as they started to move out of sight she heard Peter saying anxiously, ‘You don’t think she’ll see the glass and stop, do you?’ and her heart somersaulted in sudden shock and outrage as she heard Helen telling him matter-of-factly,
‘She can’t, not where we put it.’
‘Do you think she’ll know we’ve done it?’Peter demanded. ‘Do you think she’ll tell Aunt Maud?’
‘No,’ Helen assured him, ‘but later on, when she realises that we intend to make her leave, then she’ll know we did it,’she added with relish.
‘But she isn’t like the others,’ Peter told his sister. ‘She’s our cousin.’
‘Our second cousin,’Helen contradicted flatly. ‘And you know what’ll happen if she stays. She’ll just be like all the others, mooning about after Uncle Frazer, and then, if he gets interested in her and marries her and they have children of their own, what’s going to happen to us?’
All the anger and disbelief Rebecca had been experiencing as she listened to the twins plotting vanished abruptly as she heard the fear and loneliness behind those last words. What was going to happen to them indeed? By all accounts Rory and Lilian’s marriage was not a happy one. The reason that Lillian had agreed to accompany Rory on this Hong Kong contract in the first place, according to what Rebecca’s mother had confided to her, was that she felt it necessary to keep an eye on her errant husband.
Since the children were not allowed to go with them, it had been necessary to find somebody else to take charge of them. Frazer, of course, had been the natural choice.
Having herself been the child of parents who of necessity had had to spend long periods of time out of the country, her father before he had retired having been a diplomat, Rebecca was very familiar with the attacks of isolation and loneliness that could hit children separated from their parents for long periods of time. That was one of the reasons she made such a good teacher, or so her head had told her. She readily understood the fears and anxieties of those children who actually boarded at the school and seemed to have the knack of being able to soothe and comfort them. However, while she and Robert had had parents who had been absent for long periods during their childhood, they had never for one moment doubted their parents’ love and concern for them.
Helen and Peter, it seemed, did, and perhaps with good reason, she acknowledged uneasily. It was no secret in the family that Lillian had been annoyed when she’d discovered that she was pregnant a matter of months after she and Rory were married.
She had been twenty, Rory twenty-two—two spoiled and self-indulgent young people who had married on a whim and conceived the twins without a moment’s thought for the future responsibilities they would bring.
Rory had always been lightweight compared with Frazer, eager to taste every one of life’s pleasures, self-indulgent to the extreme. Fun to be with if fun was all one wanted from life, but with no substance to fall back on for life’s difficult and unhappy times.
‘If Frazer gets married, his new wife won’t want us living at Aysgarth. Everyone says that,’ Helen reminded her brother. ‘That means we’ll have to go away to boarding school or go and live with Gran and Gramps in Brighton.’
‘Perhaps Mum and Dad might come back and Dad will get a job here in England,’ Peter suggested hopefully, but Helen quelled his suggestion with a stern frown.
‘You know he won’t,’ she told her brother. ‘We heard them arguing about it last Christmas, don’t you remember? Mum said she’d leave Dad if it wasn’t for us. Anyway, I don’t want them to come back, because they’re always quarrelling and arguing. I want to stay here at Aysgarth with Frazer.’
Their voices faded as they made their way along the path away from her, and Rebecca felt her heart turn over with pity and compassion for them. Adults forgot how much children saw and heard and felt. Only when she was sure they were safely out of sight and earshot did she make her own way back to her car
.
The lane from here to Aysgarth was straight, apart from one particularly bad bend about fifty yards away. Thoughtfully she left her car where it was and walked towards it. As she had suspected, as she rounded the bend, she saw on the road in front of her some dangerously sharp shards of glass which, had she driven over them, must surely have severely damaged if not completely destroyed her tyres.
What neither of the twins could possibly know was that eighteen months before their birth, a very severe accident had been caused on this very bend by broken glass, though not left deliberately in that instance. A bottle which had fallen accidentally from a crate and not been noticed had broken on the road and the young couple in the car had been killed when their tyres had punctured and the car had swerved out of control off the road, plunging down into the valley, where it had burst into flames.
Rebecca was far too sensible and knew far too much about children of the twins’ age to imagine for a moment that they had thought far enough ahead to realise the possible outcome of their plans to get rid of her. Death, if they thought about it at all, was to children of that age a concept outside their grasp, unless they were unfortunate enough to suffer the loss of someone close to them.
As she picked up the glass and carefully put it in her handkerchief, carrying it back to the car with her, she pondered on how best to deal with the problem facing her.
All her desire to return to London was now gone. The twins needed her help, even if they themselves did not recognise it.
She got back into her car in a very thoughtful frame of mind indeed. The twins might not be able to recognise their need, but others might. The Great-Aunt Maud she remembered, despite her assumed vagueness and love of drama, had possessed more than her fair share of her nephew’s astuteness. Could it be that Maud had summoned her, not so much because she needed help in keeping the twins under control, but because she saw that they needed something more than mere discipline, and perhaps because she was hoping that, given the similarity of their childhood, Rebecca might be able to reach out and give the twins the reassurance and love they so obviously needed.